Ars has reviewed GNOME 3.0, and concludes: "The solid technical work that has been done under the hood really complements the new user experience features in GNOME 3.0. Despite some of the gaps in the feature set, I think that the environment and the new shell is a good starting point for building something even better. The GNOME contributors will be able to iterate on the design and move it forward in future updates."

I am guessing the way this works is that when it comes to Gnome and KDE, Gnome is geared toward people who want a very simple and straightforward desktop without a million different options to deal with, while KDE is more for tweakaholics and power users? Is that the best way to differentiate the two?

It seems to me that at this point, KDE is not only for tweakaholics, but people who just want a solid, modern desktop environment that doesn't flush years or even decades of experience and familiarity down the toilet... as long as you have a modern machine with loads of system resources, of course.

Luckily for anyone who has fewer resources, there are a whole bunch of alternatives available. But it's still sad to see the giants get so damn heavy on resources.